Dear Editor: For the United States to regain its leading global role and credibility, new understanding, approach and formulas are needed to solve national, regional and strategic security threats.

The secret negotiations under former Republican administrations with the “terrorist state” were done for political interests. It only legitimized the position and authority of the hard-line radicals. Having and insisting on a single, narrow-minded and most often failed idea is foolish and much more dangerous than not having one at all. The ways and means of the last three decades, in finding acceptable and reasonable solutions to most Iranian issues, gave us nothing but failure and more complex and dangerous problems, the ultimate goal, dream and wishful desire for the radicals and the pinnacle of self-interest for the politician on the extreme right and left.

Chuck Hagel, as the new Secretary of Defense, with his immense knowledge of political syntax, will be one of our best choices and most powerful minds to fully understand the details of national and international diverse norms and laws, transliterate cultural sensitivities, engage in a real dialogue, establish a long-lasting mutual and tolerant understanding and be able to create a new, safe and secure global harmonious order.

Rafie H. Badozian,

Mountain View

Fast and Furious

Dear Editor: When it comes to hypocrisy and lies of omission, nobody beats today’s liberals. Take the article which you for some reason reprinted from the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 30, where it talks about our supposedly “progressive” president’s supposedly earnest efforts to control automatic guns. They actually say this with a straight face while ignoring the elephant in the room — that the Obama administration was itself in Operation Fast and Furious encouraging the sale of automatic weapons to Mexican drug gangs. This resulted in hundreds of deaths.

Lest anyone think this was done by mere administrative underlings, let me remind you that Attorney General Eric Holder has been stonewalling Congress ever since on Fast and Furious, and President Obama illegally tried to claim executive privilege to avoid questioning. Why are they so anxious to avoid questioning? Why, for that matter, was Hillary Clinton so anxious to avoid questioning about Benghazi? There’s a very strange odor coming from Washington. This kind of government is in the interests of no one. The poor people and liberals will suffer along with the rest of us, and very likely more so.